Since 2007, there have been five groundings in the Canadian Arctic.

I was aboard the 364-foot Russian research-cruise ship Akademik Ioffe when it came to a violent stop after grounding on a shoal in a remote region of the Gulf of Boothia in Canada’s Arctic. Fortunately, none of the 102 passengers and 24 crew members were injured. Chemical contaminants that may or may not have been pumped out with the bilge water seemed to be minor.

It took nearly nine hours for a Hercules aircraft to fly in from the Canadian National Defence Joint Rescue Center in Trenton, Ontario, 12 hours for another DND plane to come in from Winnipeg, and 20 hours for a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter to fly over. By then we were boarding the Akademik Vavilov, a Russian sister ship that had come to the rescue.

Passengers aboard the Russian research/cruise ship Akademik Ioffe watch a Canadian military aircraft fly overhead as they wait to be rescued after running aground on a shoal in the Arctic.

Dangerous Scenarios

Had the weather not worked in our favor and had there been thick ice such as the kind we had sailed through hours earlier, we would have faced a number of challenging and potentially dangerous scenarios.

Powerful winds could have spun us around on that rock, possibly ripping a hole into the hull that might have been bigger than the one that was presumably taking in the water we saw being pumped out of the ship. Thick ice grinding up against the ship would have made it almost impossible to get everyone off into lifeboats.

I had warned about a scenario like this in my book Future Arctic: Field Notes From a World on the Edge. Only 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean in Canada, and less than two percent of the Arctic Ocean in the United States, is charted. Only 25 percent of the Canadian paper charts are deemed to be good. Some of the US charts go back to the days of Captains Cook and Vancouver and the time when the Russians owned Alaska.

I’m not the only one who has been raising the red flag. Arctic experts such as Rob Huebert, Whitney Lackenbauer, Michael Byers, and the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development have all highlighted the rising risks of shipping in the Arctic, and the formidable challenges associated with timely search and rescues and the staging of oil spill cleanups.

Our ship, for example, was forced to make a last-minute change to the starting route because of ice that was blocking passage into Resolute Bay. Recognizing the challenges, two cruise companies reportedly canceled their expeditions this year on short notice.

There is a lot that can and needs to be done to reduce future risks. The Canadian government could compel ships to use forward-looking multi-beam sonar with Bluetooth technology. Charts can and need to be updated rapidly. More weather stations are needed. The dumping of bilge water should be banned. A search and rescue team should be seasonally based in a strategic part of the Arctic. An Arctic port is needed sooner rather than later.

There is also a need to determine what impact future shipping will have on beluga and narwhal migrations.

There is time to play catch-up because there are few signs that shipping companies are in a hurry to exploit the shortcuts that the Northwest Passage offers between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the number of partial transits will increase as cruise ships, mining companies, and future oil and gas activity focus their eyes on the Arctic.